


Meet Cute

by venndaai



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Role Reversal, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-18 01:33:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13089636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: Seivarden Vendaai is nearly six months clean when a chance encounter sends her life into a spin.or, a stranger gets beat up outside a bar, and another stranger stops to help.





	Meet Cute

**Author's Note:**

  * For [slashmarks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/gifts).



The body is lying facedown in the middle of the hallway. In the middle of Seivarden Vendaai’s usual path home from work. It’s a small body, a tall child or a short adult, and whoever it is is wearing the anonymous clothing the station gives out to refugees. If Seivarden encountered this situation a year ago, she would let her eyes slide sideways, and kept walking. Or possibly she would just stand there, waiting for her path to clear. It would depend on how high she was at the moment.

But today Seivarden is clean, and she is trying to improve herself, and so she kneels down and looks the unfortunate person over. The person’s hair is a tangled mess, and there’s blood in it. She’s breathing, noisily, through a nose that is bloodied or broken.

There’s loud music nearby, and Seivarden looks up, down the hall to where a half-open door is spewing light and sound. She can’t read the sign outside but she can tell a bar when she sees one.

If this were a Radchaai station, she wouldn’t have to do anything. But it isn’t, so she flips open the cover on the piece of tech around her wrist, presses a button, and says, “Hello? There’s someone in trouble on Level Five, Corridor Six. I think she’s been knocked unconscious.”

There’s a wait period, while the station’s rudimentary AI translates her words into the local language and sends them on to emergency services, and then translates emergency services’ response back to Seivarden. During that time, the person on the ground twitches, rolls sideways slightly, and opens glazed black eyes to stare right at Seivarden. At almost the same moment, the door pushes open further and two people exit, stopping at the sight of her.

“Please,” the person on the ground says, in perfectly clear Radchaai. “Help me.”

One of the standing people says something in a language Seivarden can’t understand. It doesn’t sound friendly.

“Hello?” the machine-translated voice says flatly out of the speaker on Seivarden’s wrist.

Seivarden wants to walk away from this. It isn’t her problem. Emergency services knows there’s an issue, and maybe they won’t be here in time to save this stranger from some extra bruises but no one will die if Seivarden just backs off, goes home, turns on the entertainment system and shuts off her brain until either sleep or her next work shift comes.

But no one’s spoken to her in Radchaai in over two years. And she’s been feeling restless and reckless, anyway.

She helps the person on the ground sit up, but doesn’t take her eyes off the two aggressors. “Can I help you?” she asks, in the only language that she knows. The air temperature drops when she speaks, when she identifies herself as Radchaai, despite her local secondhand clothing and lack of pins. She can feel them looking at her gloves.

The person with the bloodied hair isn’t wearing gloves. But she’s Radchaai all right, from that accent, real Radchaai. She clings to Seivarden. There’s something off in the way she moves, and holds her head, and peers at the world through slightly unfocused eyes. Maybe she has a concussion.

One of the locals says something, and the other one laughs. Seivarden pointedly presses the button on her wrist again. “There’s been a fight. Someone here needs emergency medical assistance.” She doesn’t identify herself; her wrist band will have already done that.

This isn’t a popular part of the station. It’ll take some time for help to get here. The locals are large, but slightly shorter than her, she thinks, and they’re just drunk civilians; Seivarden may currently have the muscle tone of cooked skel leaf but she’s trained, she’s not helpless. Her new friend will be no help.

The local on the left pulls out what is undeniably some sort of gun.

_Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck._

She jumps her while she’s still taking it out, before she has a chance to even switch the safety off. Slams her into the ground and bangs her arm against the metal floor until the gun goes skittering off somewhere. She gets a kick in the stomach as reward for that, but it’s better than a hole in her head. She swings a wild punch, and connects with something hard.

_Bzzt._

The noise is odd, a high pitched shrieking. It doesn’t deafen the way a Radchaai gun would at close range, but strange lights dance in Seivarden’s vision. She turns her head. Her new acquaintance is half-sitting up, holding the gun, aimed at the second local, who is on the ground with a very large hole in her.

Seivarden and her opponent swear at exactly the same time, in different languages.

The Radchaai turns towards them. The gun is rock steady in their hands. Seivarden throws herself to the side as it discharges again.

She pushes herself up slowly, feeling bruised and battered. The Radchaai is also stumbling to her feet. The two bodies on the floor aren’t going to be getting up any time soon.

“Varden’s suppurating cuticles!” Seivarden swears. “What the fuck!”

The Radchaai turns and looks at her, still vaguely unfocused. “We need to leave,” she says calmly.

“No,” Seivarden says. “You need to leave. I called station services. They know I was here. I’ve got to- I’ve got to make a statement, probably.” She desperately wants kef. “But if you just wander around looking like that, you’ll get picked up within the hour…”

Slowly, wondering what the hell she’s doing the whole time, she digs out her room key and offers it. After a moment, the stranger takes it.

“Down the corridor, twelfth left, room 15,” Seivarden babbles. “Go! Go!” She makes a shooing motion.

The stranger stares at her a moment longer, and then goes, thankfully in the correct direction.

Seivarden looks at the bodies again, and then looks away. Fuck.

 

It’s several hours before security lets her go, but they do let her go, and she stumbles back to her room in a haze of exhaustion, relief and anger. Even if she gets to sleep within the next hour she’ll be tired at work tomorrow and it’ll all be even more miserable than usual. But she’s wondering if maybe it wouldn’t be better to run now, abandon the week’s pathetic wages and stow away on the next freighter going somewhere without extradition. There’s not much in her room that’s worth anything. She could leave now.

Except she finds herself standing in front of her door and knocking.

Time passes, Seivarden staring blankly at the number burned into the metal, before the door slides open and she’s face to face with her new friend.

If she is Radchaai- and it’s hard for Seivarden to imagine a foreigner with an accent like that- she’s provincial as hell, going by her light brown skin, straight hair, small nose and epicanthic folds. Her black eyes aren’t glazed any more, but are staring at Seivarden with a harsh stony blankness that has Seivarden blinking. Her hair and face are wet, which has Seivarden wincing at the hit to her water ration, but at least the blood seems to be gone. She looks way too fucking young to be a murderer, under thirty for sure.

“Are you going to let me in?” Seivarden asks, and she’s sure she sounds as pissed off as she feels.

The stranger steps aside, and Seivarden stomps in and slides the door closed behind her so hard it rattles. The room is tiny, almost as small as her lieutenant’s quarters on Justice of Toren, but usually she doesn’t mind, she’s so fucking grateful not to be sharing living space with some filthy foreigner, but with two people occupying it the room seems less than half the size. It only takes two stomping steps before she’s at the tiny pallet, and she flings herself down on it, rolling onto her back to stare up at the ceiling and breathe in deep. There’s silence.

“Well?” she says. “Aren’t you going to tell me your name?”

“You haven’t told me yours,” comes the insolent reply.

Seivarden nearly growls. “Seivarden Vendaai,” she says, bitterly aware that the name will mean nothing to her guest. “Of House Vendaai. Who are you?”

“Breq,” the stranger says.

Seivarden frowns. “That’s not a Radchaai name.”

No response.

“We’re a long way from anywhere. What are you doing here?”

Slowly, and with the cadence of something very obviously rehearsed, “I am not Radchaai. I am a refugee. I am looking for work.”

“You’re a fucking awful liar, that’s what you are,” Seivarden says. She sits up, studies this… Breq. Liar she might be, but she’s still an interesting puzzle, and Seivarden hasn’t felt curiosity about anything in so long.

“You killed those two people,” she says.

Breq gives her that flat stare again. “They were going to kill me. And you.”

“You don’t know that,” Seivarden insists, but Breq just looks at her like she’s being stupid, and she flushes.

“You’ve killed people,” Breq says. “I can tell.”

Seivarden finds herself laughing. “Not in a while,” she says. And, honestly, she hasn’t really killed that many, not personally. And never in an unarmored, up close and personal fight like that.

She ought to be disturbed. Instead, she’s weirdly impressed.

“You can’t stay here,” she says, and is surprised to find that she’s regretful about it. Well, it would have been nice to have someone she could talk to, even if only this strange, rude, uncivilized person. But Breq is bad news, and Seivarden is still trying to make it here, even if it increasingly feels like she’s coming to the end of her endurance. “What if someone from that bar recognizes you? You need to get off the station.”

“No money,” Breq says.

“You killed two people,” Seivarden repeats. “I’m sure you can figure out how to get on one of the ships without a ticket. It’s not hard.” She sighs, and stands up. She’s not going to get any sleep this shift anyway. “I’ll show you to the docks, at least. After that you’re on your own.”

It’s the middle of Seivarden’s night, but for most of the station it’s early morning. The corridors are full of people going to work. Seivarden winces away from the sight of some of the stranger modified beings, and focuses on remembering the way without input from the signage, very little of which she can read.

"Why help me?" Breq asks abruptly. Seivarden sighs, because she's been trying to avoid asking that question herself. 

"I don't know," she answers honestly. "Maybe I just want to be the kind of person who stupidly helps strangers. Why do you care?"

No answer to that.

They’re halfway there when Breq takes off running. Seivarden swears, then looks over her shoulder and sees the grimly intent group of people pushing their way through the crowds and swears again, harder, and runs after Breq.

It feels like it could become a bad habit. But the adrenaline rush is even better than kef.

  
  



End file.
